GIOVENTU

According to a survey of the union of temporary workers and trade unions in Bologna, Italian University teachers earn as little as €3.75 per hour. In the country which was one of the cradles of western culture, courses that are quintessential to the academic curriculum are taught by 26,000 underpaid temporary professors. The survey shows teachers at university earn between €4.28 and €17.14 per hour for a 60-hour course, or between €3.75 and €15 per hour, before tax, for a one-semester module. 85% of temporary professors in Italy teach classes assessed as compulsory for students’ curriculum, while Universities state that these external lecturers are hired only for minor disciplines or lab work.

Emigration from Italy is a major threat to its economy in the near future. Notwithstanding GDP growth and the announced economic recovery, the emigration flow continues and almost 10 per cent of the Italian population has left the country to emigrate abroad. “The financial times” reported that the number of Italians living outside the country has reached 5.4 million, an increase of 3.5 per cent over last year. The official figures may be much higher as many Italians are reluctant to formally register abroad in order not to lose their health coverage in Italy. For example, the financial times reported that the number of Italians obtaining social security numbers in the UK last year was twice the number of those officially registered as living in Britain.
Young people account for the majority of Italian emigration. The UK National Insurance statistics show that since 2002 more than 90 per cent of Italians registering to work in Britain were under 44 years old. Some 77 per cent were aged between 18 and 34 years old.

Italian students took to the streets to protest against the recently introduced job-placement schemes. The protests come after a number of demonstrations against contested school reforms named “the Good School”, passed by the previous government of Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi. There was no independent estimate of the total, but the student unions claimed 200,000 youths protested across Italy, with rallies in Rome, Naples, Milan, Salerno and other cities. It was also a protest against alleged underfunding of state schools.
The job placement scheme is a compulsory work experiences for upper secondary school students. 95% of schools - about 900,000 students – already participate in work experience schemes. Thousands of Italian school students protested nationwide over these work placements which they say doesn’t contribute to their future job prospects. Many of them reported ending up working for free in retail shops or fast food restaurants instead of having a hands-on constructive experience in a field of their interest. Italy has the EU's third-highest jobless rate of 11.2%.

Improving skills performance will be critical to foster inclusive and sustainable growth across the country. Italy has relatively few tertiary educated workers, and the inflow of new graduates to the labour market is relatively small. The share of 25 to 34-year-old Italians with university-level higher education is just 20 percent, compared to the OECD average of 30 percent for the same age group.

The “brain drain” is a well-known phenomenon in Italy which doesn’t seem to stop. In 2015, the last year for which data from Italy’s statistics institute ISTAT are available, 23,000 young Italians left the country, 15 percent over the previous year. Most of these people emigrating abroad are graduates looking for better career opportunities abroad, causing an impoverishment of the country’s human resources. The harsh truth to face is that Italy is literarily giving away its most qualified professionals and is not considered as an attractive option for foreign talents.
The brain drain phenomenon deeply differs from any previous emigration wave. First of all, as already mentioned, it mainly involves highly qualified people, but the social change is broader, as for example, it is the first time that young people leave home, in most cases leaving their parent alone, where there are no other children in the family. In the past the family emigrated together or just one of the children left. The consequences on the long run will be dramatic: Italy has already the oldest population in Europe. The brain drain is likely to trigger a consequent phenomenon: the ‘care drain’ as the elderly will be left to fend for themselves.

There was a young Italian couple among the victims of the Grenfell Tower blaze.
As the main newspapers reported, Gloria Trevisan and Marco Gottardi, both 27 years old, called parents from 23rd storey flat as they watched flames rise towards them. The couple had planned to go back home the week after to celebrate Marco’s 28th birthday on Monday the 26th of June.

Textile and fashion companies are crucial to the Italian economy: half of the Italian commercial surplus comes from these two sectors. The textile and fashion industry is Italy’s largest after machinery. Italian fashion revenues continue to outperform Italy’s broader economy. In the last part of 2016 and in the first quarter of 2017, they even picked up speed.
In 2016, exports amounted to $62 billion, creating a surplus of $25 billion, half of the Italian total, which recorded an absolute record. The fashion system in the widest sense, including products such as eyewear, jewellery and cosmetics, produced a turnover close to €84 billion.

A study by Pew Research Centre showed that more than one in three people in Italy think the country should leave the European Union.
According to this survey, most Europeans view the EU more positively since the 2016 Brexit vote, but Italy is an exception to the trend, with an increasingly unfavourable perception of the bloc.

The Italian government has made 12 vaccines mandatory for children attending school up to age 16 in an effort to combat what it described as misinformation about vaccines. An intense public debate over children’s vaccinations has characterised the last months of the Italian political scene. The populist 5-Star movement was accused of having emboldened anti-vaccine advocates. The new regulation came as an answer to the measles outbreak, this year, which has recorded three times more than the measles cases in 2016. In Italy, at present, the number of two-year-olds vaccinated against measles has dropped from more than 90% to below 80%. This is well short of the World Health Organization's recommended coverage of 95% or more.

Italians don't want to vaccinate their children any-more! As a consequence the country is experiencing an outbreak of measles epidemic after a fall-off in vaccinations.
According to the Italian health ministry there have been almost 1,500 registered cases of measles this year, while in 2016 they were 840 and 250 in 2015. The compulsory vaccinations in Italy are those against polio, tetanus, diphtheria and hepatitis B. At the moment Children can be admitted to school even if they haven't presented the vaccinations certificate. The health minister Lorenzin announced a new draft law to make the vaccinations included in the national vaccine plan 2017-19 compulsory in order to be admitted to school.